Creative Commons Licenses

If you publish an original document on OPUS you need to decide on what rights you would like your readers to have regarding your document. In order to do that and to clearly communicate these rights to useres worldwide you can chose from the Creative Commons Licenses. These are well established legal tools in use in the academic community around the world. Creative Commons offer a number of licenses but the use of the CC BY license is strongly recommended by the open-access community for scholarly content.

The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. Their tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. CC lice n ses replace individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and user. The result is a simple copyright-management regime, benefiting both copyright owners and users worldwide.

Descriptions of the various options and examples for their use can be found on the Creative Commons website.

Attribution CC BY

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Attribution ShareAlike CC BY-SA

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

Attribution-NoDerivatives CC BY-ND

This license lets others reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to you

Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives CC BY-NC-ND  

This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.